It was one of those moments that you could not think about anything else except business. You had this burning desire to do something. If you did not do it today, somebody else would. You felt the urge. You ended up quitting college, and starting your own business. Or you had your business ideas for years, but you never thought about quitting until you hit the glass ceiling without seeing a future with the company you were devoted to for years. Or a few rounds of layoffs really helped to push you to make that move.

Whatever the case may be, now for good or bad, you were out there on your own. It did not take long for you to realize that having a brilliant idea was still thousands of miles away from establishing a good business. You read everything you could find about how to establish a business. You trusted your intuition, and you soon had a good product or service in place. For years, your business had a good run, and some days, you felt on the top of the world as if this boom would go on forever.

That was then, and now is this:

The competitions zoom in on you as if they were just dropping from the sky. You feel the pressure. While your former classmates are hitting the glass ceiling, you hit the bottleneck. One moment, you felt overwhelmed, and the next moment, you did not know what to do. You lost sleep. When you do fall asleep, you feel suffocated. You are staring at a white line drawn on the board, which starts going up, then flattens out, and finally drops. Your product name is somehow attached to the tail of the line, echoing “dropping, dropping.”